Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of server provisioning and more particularly to server provisioning to heterogeneous target platforms and/or heterogeneous tasks.
Description of the Related Art
The enterprise has evolved over the past two decades from the smallest of peer to peer networks running multi-user applications without coordination, to massive distributed computing systems involving dozens of servers and thousands of clients across a vast geographical expanse. In the earlier days of enterprise class computing, deploying multi-user applications often involved nothing more than installing an application in a centralized location and providing communicative access to the different users over a small, computer communications network. Evolved configurations involved client-server computing where the power of the client computers could be exploited to support the execution of the application logic and the application data could be served from a central location.
The demands of modern enterprise class computing require more than simplistic client-server arrangements and involve the distributed deployment of multiple applications and application components across multiple different servers in different local networks banded together over a wide area utilizing high speed broadband communicative links. Creating an enterprise environment for single installation can be treated as a laboratory experiment and trial-and-error tactics rule the day. Where the installation must be repeated with consistency across installations, however, a more coordinated approach must be followed. A coordinated approach particularly can be important where customers receive the installation or the application itself as a product or service. In this circumstance, customers cannot tolerate an imperfect installation or an installation that appears to be more of a laboratory experiment than a coordinated effort.
Generally speaking, within the enterprise class environment, the coordinated installation of an application across one or more server computing platforms in a repeatable fashion has come to be known as “server provisioning” borrowing a term from the field of telecommunications. Server provisioning literally implies the deployment of an application onto a host computing platform in a coordinated and repeatable fashion. In the simplified provisioning exercise, an operator installs and configures the various applications in the host computing platform according to a pre-defined installation plan ordinarily specified by an application manufacturer or a systems integrator.
In as much as only a single host computing platform and host operating systems are to be considered in the course of the simplified provisioning exercise, the process can be relatively straightforward. In the larger enterprise, however, the process can be quite complex. So complex has server provisioning become, several manufacturers have developed automated tools for managing the server provisioning process. In conventional server provisioning tools, a set of applications and applications can be configured in a master arrangement and the master arrangement can be replicated to a target platform. Unfortunately, conventional server provisioning tools rely heavily on the nature of the target platform and are hardwired to a specified platform. To that end, conventional server provisioning tools are ill-equipped to handle heterogeneous computing environments including multiple different target platform types.